Politics and Culture

September 17, 2012

The breadth of the humiliation

In which we have confirmed what we had long suspected: that a large proportion of the world's population has the emotional maturity of a four-year-old child.

Fresh protests are taking place around the Muslim world over an amateur anti-Islam video produced in the US.

At least one protester was killed in violent protests in Pakistan and thousands attended an angry rally in the Philippines city of Marawi.

Weapons were fired and police cars torched in the Afghan capital, Kabul.

The leader of Lebanon's Hezbollah has said the US faces "very dangerous" repercussions if it allows the full video to be released.

In a rare public appearance, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah told a rally in the capital Beirut that the world did not understand the "breadth of the humiliation" caused by the "worst attack ever on Islam".

Thousands of people were on the streets, waving flags and chanting: "America, hear us - don't insult our Prophet".

Sheikh Nasrallah, the influential leader of the Shia Muslim militant group, earlier called for a week of protests - not only against American embassies, but also to press Muslim governments to express their own anger to the US....

In other developments:

About 3,000 protesters burned US and Israeli flags in the southern Philippines city of Marawi

In Yemen, hundreds of students in the capital, Sanaa, called for the expulsion of the US ambassador, said AFP

In Indonesia's capital, Jakarta, hundreds of protesters faced off with police, throwing stones and petrol bombs, while police retaliated with tear gas

More protests were reported in Srinagar, Indian-administered Kashmir

Hundreds of Palestinians staged a peaceful sit-in protest in the West Bank city of Ramallah

A small protest was held outside the US embassy in Azerbaijan's capital, Baku, AP reported.

Aren't there any Muslims out there who are just a teeny bit embarrassed by these tantrums?

It's interesting that the only comparable infantilisation that comes to mind, where derogatory remarks about a locally revered figure are met with such blind fury, is in North Korea. The rat cartoons that featured recently in their propaganda outbursts against South Korea's President Lee Myung-bak were reckoned to be inspired at least in part by the news that South Korean troops had dared to mock the Great Leader and the Dear Leader - an affront that was deemed to be intolerable to the North Korean people, for whom the sanctity of the Mt Baektu dynasty was and is an inseparable part of their identity. Or so their leaders claimed.

The North Koreans have the excuse that they'd be looking at life in a prison camp for them and their family should they dare question all this nonsense openly. In Islam it's not quite so straightforward, but at least for a substantial number it's just as effective.

Here's another similar piece, from Mustafa Malik at the San Francisco Chronicle - http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/Benghazi-murders-Revisit-free-speech-3866748.php - blaming "Western insensitivity to the Islamic faith". It all sounds very reasonable, but ultimately it's up to the West to stop being offensive to Islam. And Muslims, of course, will decide what's defined as offensive. No doubt there'll be plenty more along the same lines.

Perhaps if we compared it to the kind of appeal we might get from a North Korean sympathiser not to say unpleasant things about the late Dear Leader - "freedom of speech is all very well, but it shouldn't go so far as to show insensitivity to the North Korean people's inviolable faith in the great Juche philosophy etc etc." - it'd be clearer what our response should be.

It's odd that freedom of speech even comes into it, as it does in the Malik article. The idea seems to be that the movie should have been banned. Yet the movie was never seen to begin with. It was self-banned, so to speak. No one cared about it, or heard about it, until the embassy was attacked.